The idea that most people who are doing professional public speaking are reliable narrators is a bit quaint. There is a lot of room for framing that you have to allow for story telling. If you think that all story telling is about reliable narration, you're going to have a tough time being successful at it or interacting with others who are.
I ask a lot of questions on code reviews as it's usually less easily perceived as conformational and I have come to assume that I'm missing context when something is really off. Assume that coworkers are competent but may either have or lack context. If your coworkers are genuinely incompetent, then a new position might be better than fighting though PRs.
I read the above statement as "militarized aggressively (in comparison to the rest of the world)". The US is/was essentially able to outmuscle multiple regional powers to such a degree that they stopped even trying to compete militarily. They were/are on a different technological level, if warfare were a technology.
Saying this seriously a few decades after computers were room sized is I think a bit short sighted. Betting against technical progress especially in density / materials / weight is not a good bet.
I don't think that comparison works: the size of a computer wasn't a direct blocker for it being useful at all — it's great that I can use my MacBook Pro on the couch for a day or two but I could do just about everything sitting in front of a desk with a computer which was too big for my lap (or, a generation earlier, too big for the desk) because I didn't need to carry the computer around on my body.
VR is different in that the experience is worse until you reach a number of hard thresholds: the headset has to be light, yes, but you also need good display and sound quality, sensor tracking & lag has to be tight enough that you don't get nausea, input tracking has to be detailed enough to make behaviors feel realistic, etc. You also have practical problems for many applications — I can't move in VR without trashing my living room without even more hard problems unless you're doing something like making flight simulators.
That's not a hard problem but rather a collection of them and the problem is that the alternatives good enough for most people — i.e. few people are going to pay a significant premium for it, and even the people I know who have VR setups mention not using them much when the novelty wears off — and there's a real chicken-and-egg problem with needing high quality content to be worth all of that extra expense & hassle but not having sales volume to support it. I certainly wouldn't bet against it happening eventually but I think the trajectory is going to be more like “electric car” than “personal computer”.
The US government obviously won't ban apps for cooperating with the US government, that doesn't make sense.
But other governments should ban such apps. The CLOUD Act drafts all American tech companies into the US intelligence gathering apparatus; all American companies providing services to foreigners are legally compelled to be spies. EU laws that require EU data to be stored in the EU? Nullified! The CLOUD Act undercuts any foreign data residency laws by requiring US companies to hand over even that data which is stored in other countries. All US tech companies are required by law to participate in espionage. The EU should respond by banning all American apps in the EU (but won't, for obvious realpolitik reasons.)
That was designed as a fundamentally subversive set of lessons. I doubt we even have the will to make an accurately subversive movie version of Diamond Age (look at what happened to Altered Carbon), much less create that sort of "book".
Really exceptional response. A surprising number of people aren't aware of moral constitution, practically, even though this was a core topic for at least the last few hundred years. Interesting times we live in.
